Let's Play Crisis Bingo
by Rokhal
Summary: Sam and Dean encounter a crashed plane stuck in a swamp with an injured doctor and a woman in labor experiencing complications. Dean uses his superpowers for good.


An early Season 6 story, after "Sam, Interrupted."

* * *

Planes crash.

Planes crash into swamps next to neglected two-lane roads in Minnesota in roaring spirals of desperation, skimming clumsily over foul mud, reeds, and tree stumps, to spin to a stop in the shallows, bobbing dazedly on the water, one wing still reaching for the air. Dean pulled the car onto the crumbling shoulder and gaped down at the lakeshore where the little commuter plane floated. A man had clambered out one of the forward doors and was sitting on the tilted roof, squeezing his head between his palms.

"Don't say it," Sam said.

"Don't need to." Dean was smug. It wasn't big of him to be smug about being right all along about the evils of the airline industry when the proof in front of them involved an unknown number of casualties, but it wasn't his job to worry about stuff like that. He just got things done. "That tree looks like, what, fifty feet off?"

* * *

The plane turned out to be lying close enough to a small willow tree for Sam to anchor their rappelling rope to the trunk and wade out to the plane through forty degree sucking mud (paper beats rock) and toss the free end through the hatch. Dean got to watch as the plane inched over the mud toward the shoreline, envisioning a bunch of bedraggled executives lined up the aisle for tug-o-war, wheezing and slipping. And then the plane would drag no farther, hung up on a sunken log, swamp plants squeaking against its sides, and Sam popped out of the hatch like a groundhog to demand that Dean wade over through the icy green sludge, climb into the tin can, and help with the injured.

He waded. His boots were never going to forgive him.

"EMS is an hour out," Sam muttered as he offered a hand up. "They'll be coming from the East, so we don't have to split until they close in."

"Sweet."

"I don't know how to deliver a baby," Sam added in the same rushed tone.

"What?"

* * *

Planes were just as cramped and crammed with strangers on the ground as in the air, and the sweating, mewling, and screaming didn't help. Most of the passengers were in suits, and only a few of them were actually in the slanting seats; the rest were propped up in various uncomfortable slouches against the chair-backs, staring toward the aisle in the middle third of the small plane, where, holy crap, executive lady in one of those straight gray business skirts sprawled on the floor and trying to push out a baby.

It always sucked when something was trying to rip its way out through your insides, but Dean had figured it should hurt less when your body was actually designed for the process. From the look on her face, he'd thought wrong.

Something poked him in the shoulder and he froze. It was just Sam's finger, just trying to get his attention. "They actually have an MD, he's over by the bathroom, but, uh, it was a pretty rough landing and he's not gonna be much help. I think you have to catch the head. Least that's what I heard once."

"Huh," Dean replied. Catch the…how? Where?

"I'm pretty sure she shouldn't be that pale," Sam continued, and now that Dean thought about it, on all the movies that had the realistic, scary version of giving life to a kid, the mother was flushed and sweaty and cursing out all the men in the vicinity. "And her, her water didn't break yet. Don't know if that's normal."

The executive was gray-faced and moaning. He watched as she hitched herself up onto her elbows, spasmed, and screamed.

Holy crap, had he done that to some poor woman and never known?

"Dean," Sam snapped, doing that tight-jaw twitchy thing that meant he thought Dean was being a moron/asshole/lecherous oaf and couldn't say so with polite company looking on. The rest of the passengers, sweating and shivering in suit coats, were all watching them with the dull and longing gaze of lost, tired children.

"Huh?" Dean ran over what he'd been learned. Half-dead woman moaning on the floor. Sheeple looking on. Doctor not doctoring.

"Let's wake up the doc," he decided.

"Tried," Sam said.

"Let's try harder."

The doctor was on the floor between the foremost seat row and the cockpit barrier, where there was footroom, one bony leg twisted over the other, the foot trembling against the carpet, and the cords of his throat rigid-tense under his creased skin. "That's not sleeping," Dean remarked.

"I said he was out of it, not sleeping. Think you can get anything out of him?"

Dean really missed when Sensitive Sammy was more than just a costume piece rattling around in the ID stash. "Looks like he just lost his surface. Back, ribs'll do that." He snorted. "Or sciatica. Whew!"

The doctor's ghost-frame glasses were half-crushed under his salt-flecked hair. Dean stepped around his rigid torso and crouched at the man's head, scrubbing his own fingers together absently, shaking his head as his ears began to fill with the susurrus of shuddering breath, sliding his gaze up and down the man's slacks and polo shirt as his mind's eye swam with amalgam portraits, the phases of pain, and his brain picked three (whole-body hangnail, ratcheting backwards, drowning in etheric) and laid twenty bucks on option 2—because he knew with factual precision, the same way he knew there were only a set number of ways a semi-automatic could jam, the face the man was making with a breath pattern like that. It wasn't that it was that horrible. He just hated the fact that he'd always be right.

Dean shook his hands out and looked down.

* * *

Sam kept one eye on the passengers and the other on the pilots, skimming attention from each task to watch Dean work. Dean hovered over the doctor, not touching him, angling and reversing as though he was afraid he'd break him. He made a fist over the man's sternum to scrub him, the first thing Sam had tried, brushed his knuckles against the shirt, and pulled back his arm, frowning. He made as if to pinch the man's eyelids, changed his mind.

Sam checked the woman in labor again—three of the other businesswomen were crowded around her—and looked back to Dean in time to watch him finesse the doctor's wallet out from under his butt-cheek, check his driver's license, flick him in the ear, and bark "Paging Dr. Steward. Dr. Steward to the OR, STAT!"

Dean was breathing wrong. He had one hand shoved awkwardly in his jacket pocket, the other clenched and pumping as though he were trying to work blood into his veins. Sam automatically scanned what he could see of his limbs and sought back for some injury he might be hiding, but there was no blood in the air—and he'd notice now, for the same reason Dean could smell coffee and lard from two blocks away—and Dean shouldn't be hurt. He wasn't hurt, then, just twitchy and clamped down around himself.

Sam slowly bit into his cheek as he realized what this probably was.

Dean was working. He'd dropped the hospital PA voice and was muttering "Paul. Paulie. Rise and shine, wouldn't want those suckers out there to start self-medicating." Dean on the job was a salmon scaling a waterfall, plugging away until he reached his goal or died _en route_. Dean thought "I'll rest when I'm dead" was serious coping advice. To Dean, life was poker: when you get a bad hand, you bluff past it. Sam wished, still, that Dean would get it through his head that he had a partner in the game.

Then he'd remember that he'd pretty much blown that role at every opportunity.

"Sam," Dean barked.

Sam checked the civilians again and crouched at the doctor's side.

"Rub his feet," Dean ordered.

Sam blinked at him. He liked a nice, concise request that assumed he had the basic competence to strip down a weapon or change fluids or flesh out a family history by himself. Dad and Dean were good at that, at least when Dean wasn't feeling possessive about the car. But what Sam really wanted, and what Dad and Dean both sucked at, was context.

"What?" Sam asked.

"F'sake," Dean muttered. "Take the dude's shoes off and give him a foot massage. Don't be gentle, you gotta give him something to think about."

"Right," said Sam. He picked at the laces of the gleaming walnut penny loafers, stripped them off, and opted to leave the stranger's merino-wool socks, crusted with foot powder near the toes, in place. Mustering his Discovery Channel knowledge of the ancient art of acupressure, he grabbed hold and went to work in smooth, circling strokes, up and down and around, feeling knotty wiry cords and bones vibrating and tetanic, cramped, resisting. He bent to work with both hands on the right foot, mustering leverage to force some flexion back into the toes, and startled when the man's ankle twitched.

"Both sides," said Dean. He had his hands on the man's scalp and was scritching him, Sam swore, like a dog. "We're not NFL trainers here, just keep moving."

Sam raised an eyebrow at him, but Dean had already looked away. He went back to his acupressure circles.

"Hands off on three," Dean interrupted, after a few minutes of mysterious tedium, perhaps sensing Sam's snowballing urge to jump over the doctor and pound an explanation out of him. Sam was getting some cramps of his own in his thumbs. "One, two, three," Dean said, and they stopped massaging and head-scratching.

The doctor groaned and his eyes fluttered, vacant.

Dean pounced. "We're on a plane," he growled into the man's face. "There's a woman trying to pop out a baby, but something's wrong, she's bleeding inside or something. Help is two hours out. You're in charge, what do we do?"

The doctor stared up at him like a romance heroine or a puppy or something—from where Sam sat, it was creepy past words. Dean brushed his fingers past the side of the doctor's face and he leaned into the touch, eyes glazing over. "You got work to do, focus," Dean snapped, hand vanishing. "Woman in labor. She's turning gray. What do we do?"

"Shock," the doctor breathed at last. "Treat for shock, till we have a pulse, BP. Start her on normal saline 'till she's stable, get obstetrics to rule out placental abruption…"

"Okay, Paul," Dean murmured. "I want you to try something a little different. Pretend we're in…Rwanda. There's a woman in labor, turning gray. We're in the back of a Jeep, she's lying on a couple of gas cans, there's nobody around but you, her, me, and my brother on a piece of crap road in Rwanda. We gotta get her to help. You're in charge. What do we do?"

The doctor gave a wry, pained smile and tried to sit up. Dean clamped him to the floor by his shoulders, but he shifted enough for whatever had popped loose in his spine or his ribs to send him frozen and rigid again.

Dean stroked his hair. "Come on, ride it out. Pregnant woman. You're in charge."

The doctor eased back onto the floor, lips a line like cracked cement, eyes resless. "Worst case is hemorrhage. The shock would kill her before the help…gets here. O2 dep. Brain damage. They built something for that, for those countries, trying to buy time…that crazy wetsuit thing. Shock garment."

Dean blinked down at him, suddenly drawn inward, and Sam would have been curious, but someone in the passenger compartment shrieked. He stood and checked.

"She's passed out," he informed Dean, finding his brother standing just behind his shoulder.

"Do they give you blankets on planes, or am I just crazy?" Dean asked.

"You're not just crazy," Sam told him, distracted by the growing crowd around the still form in the aisle.

"Good to hear. Let's get some."

* * *

Whatever Dean had planned for the airline blankets was a little more complicated than "keep her warm and elevate her feet," but he wasn't sharing, and whatever manic kick he'd been on seemed to have stalled out. He had a wad of fluffy blue polyester in his hands and was stretching it in different directions, possibly testing.

Sam bumped his shoulder, and Dean jumped like one of those screw-loose Vets that got to define PTSD from 1970 to posterity. He hid his own flinch. "What now?" he reminded him.

Dean snapped back like the laptop unfreezing. "Hold this," he ordered, passing one corner of the blanket to Sam. He reached down his mud-caked boot for a knife, and slit it in half down the length, then the long halves crosswise. He marched to the dying woman, pressing through the other passengers with a touch here and there, gentle and inexorable leverage, until he knelt at her knees. Her breaths were shallow and slowing. "Pin," Dean muttered.

"What kind?" Sam asked, picking his way through the path Dean had cleared and trying to choose a person to push aside so he could sit down.

"Big pins," said Dean. "Sharp. Maybe six inches or so."

It wasn't like Dean to get stymied by technicalities like this. "What for?" Sam pressed.

"Gotta stretch it around and make it stay," said Dean, wrapping a blanket quarter loosely around the woman's calf.

They didn't have any hat pins. Hinge pins. Nothing bigger than a safety pin, and Sam just had two in his pockets, but he knew more than one way to secure a pressure bandage. "Knife," Sam said, and when Dean passed it to him, he sliced inch-wide strips into the piece of blanket, shredding it into a rough fringe, and the other side to match. Dean stared at his hands as he worked, as though he wasn't catching on—and it wasn't like Dean to not catch on—until Sam wrapped the scrap around the woman's calf and tightened it in place by a knot in the fringe ends.

"God bless polyester," said Dean, gazing at Sam's handywork like it was some 15-second trick to unscramble porn. He shoved Sam's hands away and knotted the blanket down, tighten and tie, making a growing row of spidery cloth fingers squeezing. "Cut me another piece and do some bigger ones for her thighs."

They worked fast, bundling the woman's legs into a soft, all-over tourniquet. Squeeze the blood back into the body, Sam thought. All the way up to her brain. Her breathing picked back up as they got to work on her arms, her cheeks more live than ashen. Dean's fingers tugged purposefully at the ties, testing tension, adjusting the lay of the fabric, efficient, clinical. Sam finished the last tie on her right arm and Dean shifted over to check his work.

The woman opened hazed gray eyes just as Sam was tugging her skirt back into place. She blinked at then and pressed her head back into the carpet with a muted moan as a shudder rippled over the globe of her belly. "Aw, God, it's not a nightmare," she lamented, latching onto the closest living thing she could reach—the crook of Dean's elbow—with white knuckles above her sturdy French manicure.

Dean eased her hand loose and transferred it to an older woman watching from a nearby aisle, finally meeting Sam's eyes as he mouthed, "Ow. Ow. Ow."

* * *

They left the rope with the plane. Used to be, Dean would have protested the waste and Sam would have gone all chivalrous on him and put his foot down, but Dean was finally starting to realize he couldn't depend on Sam that way anymore.

Though he had made Dean pre-deliver a baby, even when no stage of baby delivery was a stage a Winchester had any business pitching in on. Now if they could get off this road and locate some beer, without Sam warming up another old habit and asking annoying questions, Dean would almost call it a good day.

Subtract the mud. Good day.

In the passenger seat, Sam shifted irritably on a plastic drop cloth, crinkling, and Dean curled and uncurled his toes to keep from thinking about the itch from his own swamp-logged boxers. "When did you learn how to do that?" Sam asked.

Sammy's law: whatever can be Talked About, will be Talked About, for as long as possible at the worst possible time. Sam was like a truffle pig, heedlessly sniffing out what Dean knew should remain buried, but what Frenchmen and college kids assigned some mystical value and unearthed at every opportunity.

"It's a way to wake people up when they pass out from shock," Dean said. He almost reached for the volume knob, but stopped himself. Rocking out was one of his tells.

"To increase blood pressure and prevent organ failure," said Sam, nodding, and leave it to Sam to look up the rationales for all the first-aid principles they'd been drilled to second nature in by the time they hit junior high. "Who taught you?" Sam asked, not prying, not morbidly curious, not eyes-welling-with-concern for once, and for a second Dean clutched the wheel and clenched his jaw, positive he was going to start laughing hysterically.

He didn't. He unscrewed a water bottle one-handed and chugged half of it. He could say, "A friend of Dad's. He's dead." But then Sam might get all Bambi-eyed and try to find out which of Dad's friends beside Bobby had been decent, less-than-psychotic human beings, or how many friends Dad could possibly have had for more than two hunts.

He tried out their new honesty thing. "I don't want to talk about it."

Sam gave him a look like he'd gone off the script.

Dean raised his eyebrows in exasperation. "Dude. Boundaries. Shrink's orders."

Sam snorted and they drove West in relative silence, until Dean figured it was safe to turn up AC/DC and rock out.

* * *

After slogging back and forth through the swamp, Dean's pants and boots were soaked with green-brown sludge that reeked of sulfur and fresh earth. Right now, he wished he didn't have a plastic sheet under his ass, but the sheet was saving the leather from yet more gunk that would never scrub off.

His brain was the same way now—not like before when his mind was a street-wide gutter and he could instantly bump up a conversation from PG to NC-17 just by taking the brakes off his mouth—now it wasn't funny. Sulfur and gangrene and musk and rancid rooms, and things that didn't belong where the sun shone.

So he didn't tell Sam that people could pass out in Hell, depending on what the game was, and when they did, somebody woke them up. Sam didn't need to know the mechanical differences between scraps of polyester and scraps of human skin.

A medevac chopper, loaded down with EMTs and IVs and probably bags of O negative, whopped steadily over the woods to the East. Dean stole a glance in the rear view mirror and caught the flash of sunset gleaming against its windows. Sam's estimate of two hours had been just about right.

"Still don't think there's a case?" Sam asked.

Case. Right. "What, like plane crashes are unusual?"

Sam's face said Dean was being too stupid for words.

"So it's strong, it's fast, it's got a reach like Shaquille O'Neal, and it attacks in the daylight," Dean said. "Let's drop a tree on the road and research from outside the swamp."

"You just want to get the paper and find out if it's a boy or a girl."

"No, Frances, that's you."

* * *

**Note: **The NASG, or Non-pneumatic Anti-Shock Garment, is a first-aid device made out of neoprene. They're working on distributing it to developing countries with poor access to advanced medicine, mostly so women who have pregnancy complications such as hemorrhage will have more time to reach competent help.

On a different tangent, I figure that Alastair, when he was alive, was a doctor. A great, kind-hearted, passionate family doctor, with tremendous talent and interest. Possibly Galen. But then he went to Hell, and Hell takes a person's good qualities and flips them backward, leaving them with the same skills and bents and interests, now tuned for destruction. Alastair possesses a doctor; he uses a dark operating table and a scalpel. When we see him working on Ruby, he seems to be manipulating intact structures inside her host's abdomen, as if he understands how they work and the best ways to repurpose them to deliver pain. I thought it would be ironic for him to invent a medical device just to show off his ingenuity.

There also seems to be some correlation between demons' personalities and the hosts they can take, with some, like the phantom traveler, needing a weakness to exploit, and others, like Lilith, Alastair, and Azazel, able to possess the human exemplars of innocence, compassion, and fatherly duty, respectively. You could argue that age is a big factor, but also that better people turn into scarier demons.


End file.
